1. Field of the Invention
This invention is related to the field of application performance management and, more particularly, to internal monitoring of applications in a distributed management framework.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the information technology (IT) departments of modern organizations, one of the biggest challenges is meeting the increasingly demanding service levels required by users. With more and more applications directly accessible to customers via automated interfaces such as the world wide web, “normal” business hours for many enterprises are now 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The need for continuous availability and performance of applications has created complex, tiered IT infrastructures which often include web servers, middleware, networking, database, and storage components. These components may be from different vendors and may reside on different computing platforms. A problem with any of these components can impact the performance of applications throughout the enterprise.
The performance of key applications is a function of how well the infrastructure components work in concert with each other to deliver services. With the growing complexity of heterogeneous IT environments, however, the source of performance problems is often unclear. Consequently, application performance problems can be difficult to detect and correct. Furthermore, tracking application performance manually can be an expensive and labor-intensive task. Therefore, it is usually desirable that application performance management tasks be automated.
Automated tools for application performance management may assist in providing a consistently high level of performance and availability. These automated tools may result in lower costs per transaction while maximizing and leveraging the resources that have already been spent on the application delivery infrastructure. Automated tools for application performance management may give finer control of applications to IT departments. Application performance management tools may enable IT departments to be proactive and fix application performance issues before the issues affect users. Historical performance data collected by these tools can be used for reports, trending analyses, and capacity planning. By correlating this collected information across application tiers, application performance management tools may provide actionable advice to help IT departments solve current and potential problems.
Typically, a significant portion of any IT budget is incurred in trying to sustain business objectives. Without the ability to peer into the quality of application software, the benefits of other IT investments cannot easily be seen, and efforts spent on ensuring optimal performance of infrastructure components may never be appreciated. IT organizations are often required to manage deployment of business-critical applications that have poor reliability, performance, or scalability. Server-based enterprise applications present a particularly significant challenge for IT organizations trying to provide required service levels while controlling IT infrastructure costs. It is desirable to provide improved systems and methods for application performance management, health monitoring, and error resolution.